Jim Camden

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' new baby has been released from the hospital and is home with his parents after treatment for complications of his premature birth, but he has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. A letter from the Eastern Washington congresswoman released Wednesday by her staff said Cole McMorris Rodgers, who was born about four weeks premature, was allowed to go home after about three weeks in the hospital. He successfully underwent surgery for an intestinal blockage, the letter said.

In a deadly start to the month of May, roadside bombs claimed the lives of eight Northwest soldiers and the legs of a ninth. Six members of a Fort Lewis Stryker brigade were killed Sunday by a bomb in Diyala province, and two members of an Army Reserve unit based in Hayden Lake were killed May 3 by an improvised explosive device that ripped into their armored vehicle near Ramadi.

During his year in Vietnam, Don Royal Hampton flew more missions than any pilot before him. He averaged more than two a day in a cargo plane, which he would use to bring supplies into, and take the wounded out of, Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

Washington state will spend more money on economic development and find better ways to spend it, under a bill signed Tuesday by Gov. Chris Gregoire. With many of Spokane's business and political leaders watching, Gregoire signed Senate Bill 5092, which she said will rearrange the state's approach to providing money for economic assistance.

Congress has passed an emergency spending plan with billions for extra programs and timetables for withdrawing troops from Iraq – as expected. President Bush is likely to veto it next week – as expected.

When Raquela Davis had to return to work after her six weeks of maternity leave, she was worried about the kind of care new daughter Makaile would get. She had the same worries that most new mothers would have: "Are they going to be able to take care of her like I take care of her?"

As a young Marine in Vietnam, Sammye Weinstock once wrote home about the military's efforts to strip the dense jungle around him by spraying chemicals from above. It seemed as though the leaves were melting off the trees over his head, he wrote in a letter to his brother Harold in Spokane in the late 1960s.

A theology student who operates a cannon, a command post manager who serves on a park board, a vehicle dispatcher who coaches baseball and a survival instructor with a long string of awards as a top noncommissioned officer were honored Thursday as Armed Forces Persons of the Year. The four were selected by the Military Affairs Committee of Greater Spokane Inc. as the top nominees in categories for active duty and Guard or Reserve units serving in the Spokane area.

Commanders at the Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base are preparing to lose their four rescue helicopters this summer under orders from the Pentagon. But that doesn't mean they would turn down a chance Wednesday to tell their congresswoman just how important those UH-1N Hueys from the 36th Rescue Flight are to their primary job of training Air Force flight crews, and their secondary job of rescuing civilians who get in trouble in a four-state area.

There aren't many words to describe the sight of a kamikaze plane dropping down onto a ship, Stan Primmer said. "It's beyond frightening," the Rockford farmer said of the morning of June 22, 1945, when he was an 18-year-old gunner aboard the LST 534 off the island of Okinawa.

A federal judge in Portland was right to reject the government's plan for operating Columbia and Snake River dams that could push some runs of salmon closer to extinction, an appeals court ruled Monday. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a 2004 federal plan, known as a Biological Opinion or BiOp, is "structurally flawed" and violates the Endangered Species Act. The federal agency that wrote it, then known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, had argued that the federal dams were part of the "immutable environment" because they existed before the law was passed.

HOPKINS RIDGE, Wash. – The three-bladed windmills that slice the air above the greening Palouse hills present a new crop for Columbia County farmers. They can mean as much as $1,000 a month, per wind turbine, when the wind is blowing and the electricity is flowing down the line to the Northwest's power grid. But there are limits to what a person can sow and reap in alternative energy. In the case of wind energy, one of the biggest limitations is not a shortage of land on which to plant the 200-foot-tall towers, but the shortage of capacity on the Bonneville Power Administration's transmission lines.